In 1997 Pope John Paul II declared Isidore of Seville the patron saint of the internet. Saint Isidore died in the year 636, long before the first host-to-host ARPANET connection in 1969. But Isidore did try to record everything ever known in an encyclopedia that was ultimately published after his death.

Today the phrase "the American Dream" is a staple of political campaigns, book titles, and economic discussions. Everybody's heard it, but nobody knows quite how to define it. It's a phrase that feels as old as the country itself. But the American Dream wasn't invented in 1776. The term was coined in 1931.

Everybody knows that the female praying mantis will sometimes eat her partner after he's mated with her. But new research suggests that some female mantids on the verge of starvation will actually fake fertility in order to lure mates to snack on.

The oil crisis of the 1970s meant that Americans had to wait in long lines to fill up their cars. But in the Netherlands, the government decided that the best way to conserve fuel was to ban cars for one day a week. How did people cope? They took their horses on the highway.

In 1936 Ayn Rand was no fan of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal programs. So it may come as a surprise to fans of Rand that the libertarian icon took money from the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Theatre Project. Like a lot of money.

Today we're fact-checking UberFacts so you don't have to.
Again. We looked at every "fact" tweeted by the incredibly popular Twitter account on Sunday from midnight until midnight PT. The account failed miserably. Again.

It’s one of those Thanksgiving fun facts I loved repeating when I was a kid: Ben Franklin liked turkeys so much that he wanted them to be our national bird, instead of the bald eagle. It’s a popular fun fact. But I was shattered to learn as an adult that this little nugget of trivia isn’t quite true.

The internet loves fun facts about Colonel Sanders. Yes, he was a real man named Harland Sanders. And yes, he really was a colonel. (Well, kind of.) But there's one fun fact about everybody's favorite chicken salesman that simply isn't true. Despite what you may have read online, Colonel Sanders never killed a man…

Everybody knows that "The Star-Spangled Banner" boldly proclaims that our flag flies over the land of the free and the home of the brave. But in Francis Scott Key's original 1814 manuscript for our national anthem, there are surprisingly more question marks than you might guess — including after the phrase "home of…

There are all kinds of dark alternate histories to think about. What if the Nazis had won World War II? What if the doomsday prophecies about 2012 had made any sense? And what if brunch had actually been called blunch?

According to a recent post that's gone viral among science and history nerds, the first baby born to a mother under anaesthesia named her baby Anaesthesia. It's an amusing fun fact. But unfortunately, it's too good to be true. Anaesthesia was reportedly a nickname sometimes used by the doctor who delivered the baby…

A new paper from the US Copyright Office has been published to clarify what can and what cannot be copyrighted. Novels written by human beings are covered. What’s not covered? Photos taken by monkeys, murals painted by elephants, and songs written by ghosts.

Some of the most well-known dinosaurs that we think about today were separated by tens of millions of years. In fact, we're closer to the time of the T-Rex than T-Rex was to the time of the Stegosaurus. Unfortunately, that documentary The Land Before Time was totally lying to us.

Back in college I took an undergrad law course that devoted a day to looking at silly old laws that were still on the books. One of the laws stated that it was illegal to serve margarine in any Wisconsin restaurant without also offering customers butter. The whole class thought it was hilarious. And then, not a few…

Leprosy is both incredibly rare and treatable in the United States. There are only about 150-250 cases of leprosy in the U.S. each year. Most of these people get it when they travel overseas. But what about people who haven't traveled outside the country? The government believes those people most likely contract it…